Obrienp

I agree with you about the pickguard but why would they put a two saddle bridge on it? Especially as it is likely to be sold at a premium price! Intonation is a bit dodgy on short scale basses anyway; why make it even worse? The first thing I would want to do as an owner, is put a decent four saddle bridge on it and it would just annoy me that I have to do that on a premium instrument.

Yep but the Standard is even cheaper: £85! I was trying to work out what justified the extra £18 and noticed that the SBK body is poplar and the Standard basswood. I suppose the black chrome hardware might add a bit of cost too. I would like these even more if they had a jazz style neck. The Standard has a typical P-bass 42mm nut width and the SBK stats don’t say, so I assume it is the same.

I guess most people on here would rip off all the hardware and electronics to replace them with better after market items. However, you can’t cure a dodgy truss rod that way. It might still be worth it if you get a good one. I can’t think of another shorty P-Bass like object that comes anywhere near this price bracket.

P.S. Thank you for the suggestions folks. Quite a lot to try in the future!

I thought I should tie the thread up with what I actually did. Having considered the passive switch and the fully passive option, I decided to go for a two band Glockenlang preamp, as a drop in replacement (ha, ha). I didn’t want to drill anymore holes in the bass, so that ruled out the passive switch and stacked vol/tone pot. The Glockenlang has good write-ups and it gives me the passive circuit out of the box. I am holding the totally passive mod as a fall back, if I’m not satisfied with the active/passive solution. As @BassBunny said above, the Glockenlang doesn’t colour the sound of the pickups but that also reveals their imperfections, so I decided I would upgrade in that department too. I set myself a total budget of £200 for the mods, so that limited my choices. I went for a Tonerider TRP-1 for the precision (£35 from their website) and stupidly didn’t go for the P/J set (£65), thinking I didn’t care about the J. I’ve had the Tonerider P before and thought it was as good as most more expensive aftermarket pickups I’ve tried. Later on in the process I decided I did want to replace the J but to keep within my budget I went for a Wilkinson WBJ. It came with wires in the same colour scheme (yellow and black) as the OEMs. I wonder if the OEMs come from the Wilkinson factory? Still with a bit of cash left from my £200, I got a set of Wilkinson lightweight machine heads (£28). Strictly speaking this took me about £10 over budget when all the postage charges are accounted for. Installation wasn’t quite as straightforward as I hoped. It turns out the OEM J pickup is not a standard J bridge size. I needed to enlarge the route at both ends, especially as I shielded all the cavities with copper tape. Despite using masking tape on the paintwork, the routing process caused a few chips around the edge of the pickup cavity. It seems the standard paint flakes off pretty easily. I’m now looking for a touch up stick in that shade of matte black. It turns out that the wiring diagram that comes with the Glockenlang isn’t quite right. I had read about this elsewhere, so I used my multimeter quite a lot to sort out the ground connections from the battery positive and where the pickups connect to the balance pot. You have to solder onto circuit boards, which I am nervous about but managed without overheating them. I didn’t want to have to do it again, if I changed pickups, so soldered my own wires onto the boards and then joined them with connector blocks to the pickup leads, ground leads and battery lead. This will make any rewiring pretty easy but it did make the control cavity very cluttered, what with the boards on the preamp pots and the replacement Neutrik barrel jack I used, which protruded into the cavity much further than the OEM item. Having got it all connected, I discovered that the thread on the Glockenlang pots is barely deep enough to get through the body: with the locking washers on the pot shafts on the inside, I had to ditch the washers that go under the nut on the outside. Even then they only nipped up by about one thread. However, it does seem to be holding. The other little annoyance was that the leads on the battery clip provided by Glockenlang are pretty short. You have to extend them with extra wire to reach the sleeve terminal on the barrel jack and to have enough slack to change the battery. After the hassle above, I was quite relieved that the Wilkinson lightweight tuners are a drop in replacement for the OEM machine heads. The jury is out on whether they are actually lighter than the OEM machine heads but they do have a better action. I guess they can make them look like Hipshots but can’t afford the same lightweight alloys at the price point. I now have a pretty nifty bass. All the lightweight, ergonomics and playability of the original but with better electronics and machine heads. It still doesn’t sound like a good Precision to my ears but it’s close enough and I guess it could never get there, given the lightweight body and slim neck. I’m liking the Wilkinson Jazz pickup as well. Nice burpy sound with the tone rolled off and does add a bit extra bite blended with the P, along with that nasal tone when set 50:50.

That’s nice! Wish I hadn’t seen that!

I have both the Kent Armstrong and Warman pickups that I have used in a passive bass. I like the Kent Armstrong: enough output and the covered top means you don’t get the buzzing from accidentally touching the pole pieces. The Warman is higher output and not as refined to my ears. Both sound quite Stingray like to me used in passive mode. Both pickups have four conductors, so you can do parallel/single coil/series switching. That really opens up your tone palette.

Yep, although I am hoping my work doesn’t leave too much live wire exposed but live lugs on pots, especially if there is a danger of it twisting and making contact with the shielding. I guess that even the grounded parts of a pot touching the shielding might generate a crackle but not sure about that.

Do you find it as effective as copper tape? I’ve had basses that had cavities painted with graphite paint from the factory and they are still noisy. Put copper tape over the paint and the noise disappears. Of course, the factory might not have put as many layers on as you do but it has made me default to copper tape as the best solution.

Not sure whether the question was specifically regarding passive or active electronics but from experience, you really do need to shield the control cavity with active. All the Ibby basses I have owned with active electronics have picked up mobile phones near them. Shielding the cavity stopped this. I always shield my passive basses as well. It has never caused a problem and they have become quieter as a result, so I am assuming the cavity shielding contributed. Where the cavity is really tight, I put a bit of insulating tape over any areas of shielding that could possibly make contact with any live part of the electronics.

That does look interesting! I hope it does what you want. 👍

I quite like the idea of a rotary switch like a Varitone but I have looked for one of those switches before and I haven’t been able to find one. Do you know a source? WRT the Glockenlang. I guess it depends how much value you put on your time. The Glockenlang and the Bartolini preamps come prewired, which would save me several hours with a soldering iron (I am a bit clumsy in my old age, also lazy).

I find cloth covered wire easier to work with, especially when it is pre-tinned. You just push the cloth up to expose a bit of wire, instead of having to mess around with wire strippers, or a knife. You are right about reusing the jack socket but those Ibby sockets do tend to fail after a bit and I prefer the more conventional Switchcraft type. They are more reliable and the Pure Tone ones give a very good contact.

Well it is marked concentric and it doesn’t look like the Bourne balance pot I also got from Allparts several years ago and haven’t used yet.

Yeah. You are right. The only thing I could find was from Allparts and it must have the smallest diameter pots in the world attached. They are barely bigger than the shaft and I have no idea whether it is log or lin. All the usual culprits are sold out and anything by CTS, or Alpha in 250k doesn’t seem to have a deep enough thread to mount through the body. I am beginning to think it is going to be a lot easier to go the replacement preamp route (Glockenlang I think), or make it completely passive: vol, vol, tone, tone. Passive will be cheaper but not a huge amount: 4 x decent 250k long shaft pots, 2 x caps, more cloth covered wire, decent replacement mono jack socket that fits (difficult), or use a standard mono socket and a surface mounting plate, in which case I will have to ream out the hole for the jack socket. Although I might do the reaming anyway, as I am not a great fan of the acoustic style, cylinder jack sockets that Ibanez use.

Thank you. That’s very helpful. I would go for the 4 pot 2 band, if I decided to go down that route. I feel like I want to try my mod, just to see if it works but I am just going to wire it up to test it, before I drill any holes in the body, like you did. If that proves to be a failure, I might well go for a Glockenlang. I suppose one benefit of going for a replacement preamp and pickups is that you can remove the existing electronics without cutting any wires, which would make it easier to put it back to stock to sell it. Alternatively I could just convert it to all passive and keep the stock electronics intact for resale: that would be the low cost option. Decisions, decisions!

Sorry. Follow up question: when you put the Glockenlang in passive mode, does one of the pots act as a passive tone control, or is it straight through to the output?

Thanks, that good to know.

Thank you for sharing that. That is food for thought. I can think of a few possible causes for the noise: 1). I wonder if the problem was not switching the preamp off. If I have understood your diagram properly, your passive mode rerouted the output from the pickups directly to the output jack but left the preamp powered up. Perhaps that generated some kind of radio interference; 2). The bass doesn’t look very well shielded because the active electronics make it pretty quiet, so it’s not necessary in stock configuration but in passive mode there would be hum from the single coil jazz pickup. Although if they are both on in passive mode you would think this would be less of a problem. I guess it depends how they are phased; 3.) in passive mode was the bridge ground interrupted? According to the OEM circuit diagram, the bridge ground goes to the volume pot and then the circuit seems to go to the main board of the preamp, which means it might stop there in passive mode because that route is interrupted, or is it? I think I would need to test that one with a multimeter; 4). I am assuming that the input from the pickups was the hot wires only, in which case where did the ground wires go? Did they get a direct run to the output jack, or did they go to the preamp, in which case could that have caused noise? I guess it could be a combination of some, or all of the above. I think the lesson for me might be to shield all the cavities with copper tape and run ground wires everywhere. I am only using the P pickup in passive mode, so hopefully there won’t be any out of phase issues with the Jazz pickup. 🤞 I’m thinking that, when I have done with adding the switch and extra knob, the controls will look like those on the more expensive SR series basses that have three band preamps and a three position toggle switch (coil tap, active, passive). Perhaps it won’t take too much of a value hit in that case. I agree with you that they are great little basses. For me the only thing missing is a passive switch. In fact I did think of just removing the preamp and converting it to all passive: vol/tone, vol/tone but I quite like having the active option. BTW, which replacement preamp did you use and would you recommend it? Just in case I decide my wiring plans are too much like hard work!

@itu Thank you for reading through all the waffle in my post and for your suggestions. Yes, you are right. Switching from active to passive is going to create quite a loud pop. I will just have to remember to engage the mute on my tuner pedal, or amp when I do it. Especially when I DI into the PA. I like your hidden switch idea. If I was just adding the passive circuit in case the battery died during a gig, I would do this but my motivation is more about getting the classic passive P bass tone. Unfortunately I don’t think it would be possible to replace the treble and bass pots with stacked pots, without messing up the preamp. The OEM pots Ibanez fit have circuit boards attached and mini connector sockets. The connectors are not an insurmountable problem but I think there might actually be some processing occurring in the circuit on the boards. The pots are also a weird impedance, which wouldn’t really be compatible with a passive circuit. I’m not sure I could find stacked pots with the right combination of impedance values for both the active and passive circuits. If I was going to go down the route of not drilling holes, I think I would bite the bullet and buy a replacement preamp with an active/passive switch. However, together with a better P bass pickup, that option would cost as much as the bass itself did. In my experience, you never recover anything like what you have spent on modifications when you come to sell a bass.